“Women Who Explained the World to Us: Polish Left Cultural Activists as Agents of Anti-Colonialism and Socialist Solidarity with the Global South in the Long Sixties and Beyond,” Agnieszka Mrozik
SEENEXT Working Group
March 11, 2025
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Location
Institute for the Humanities, 153 Behavioral Sciences Building
Address
1007 W. Harrison St, Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
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Who were the women who, after the Second World War, introduced the world to Polish society and contributed to its better understanding? What role did they play as producers of knowledge and/or intermediaries in shaping anti-colonial sentiments and building solidarity between socialist Poland and the countries of the Global South during decolonization and afterward? The lecture explores these questions by looking at the lives and activities of Polish left cultural activists: female reporters and correspondents for the Polish Press Agency, travel writers, literary translators, magazine editors, and publishers of popular travel series, who through their work, sought to help Polish society understand the problems of the Cold War era. It excavates their now-forgotten commitment to anti-colonial activism.
Agnieszka Mrozik is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Currently, she is a Dianne Widzinski Senior Fellow at the Copernicus Center for Polish Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Architektki PRL-u: Komunistki, literatura i emancypacja kobiet w powojennej Polsce [Female architects of the Polish People’s Republic: Communist women, literature, and women’s emancipation in postwar Poland] (Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2022) and Akuszerki transformacji: Kobiety, literatura i władza w Polsce po 1989 roku [Midwives of the transformation: Women, literature, and power in post-1989 Poland] (Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2012).
Co-sponsored by The Stefan and Lucy Hejna Family Chair in the History of Poland
Date posted
Feb 14, 2025
Date updated
Feb 18, 2025